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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 9799883" data-attributes="member: 177">So, this is what I mean...Your focus on "truly alien mind" is, itself, not a peer-journal worthy consideration.  You're dropping nuance.While I've got issues with Orson Scott Card for other reasons, in the Ender's Game series, he introduced us to a Hierarchy of Foreignness.  We can consider that there are degrees of alienness of mental processes - From humans just like us, to humans from another nation, to humans from another planet, to "humans" who are of a different species but with whom we can still meaningfully communicate and cooperate (the word for them is "ramen" in the books), to creatures who are so alien that no communication is possible ("varelse" is the word for them).Only the varelse are "truly alien".  Others are different to varying degrees, but understandable.  And in the books, even the one species we are led to believe are varelse, turn out, after a genocidal war, to actually be ramen.I don't buy it.  We can understand things that aren't exactly ourselves.  The whole point of having imaginations and abstract thought is to be able to model things that aren't exactly as we see them currently.  There will be flaws, and our attempts may be amateurish, but that doesn't mean we are incapable of it.</blockquote>